Wadham College has made its freshers’ week ‘Sexual Health and Consent’ workshops compulsory this year. The classes have previously run for a number of years but on an optional basis.

The classes are led and organised by OUSU-trained student facilitators, and have been taking place in the college for some years, but up until now, this has only been on an optional basis.

The hour-long workshops talked small groups of first year students through a number of issues including sexual violence, assault and rape. The majority of the sessions were spent running through scenarios in a university setting in which consent was either dubious, withdrawn or absent.

The move to make the workshops compulsory has, for some, been controversial. One third-year engineer expressed concerns that the workshop seemed “patronising and ultimately pointless”. She said, “Everybody knows what consent means.”

Other students were more positive about the classes though; one fourth-year physicist said, “It makes complete sense to make them compulsory because the people who are going to need them are the people who wouldn’t originally go out of their way to go.”

Wadham student facilitator Lucy Delaney acknowledged that there may be some controversy over the matter, telling Cherwell, “There were concerns that if made compulsory no one would go anyway, and certain people may see it as mundane or silly or ‘not for them’ or even too authoritarian.”

This is not the first time such events have been run in the University; other colleges have run similar workshops, including Corpus Christi, Christ Church and St Anthony’s. Pembroke is to host a discussion group about some of the messages conveyed in Robin Thicke’s somewhat controversial pop song ‘Blurred Lines’.

Delaney was also involved with the running of the non-compulsory sexual consent workshops running at St Anne’s College. Concerning these she told Cherwell, “There were obviously fewer people, and the ones who did show up were more clued up and enthusiastic. Yet despite there being the drawback of it not being compulsory, I still felt this was a valuable session — even those enthusiastic about the topic were still shocked by the statistics.”

This was the first year that St Anne’s ran the workshops, and freshers who attended received a free STACS (St Anne’s Coffee Shop) voucher.

Camille Fenton, the JCR Women’s Officer at St Anne’s and third year mathematician told Cherwell, “We do hope to increase attendance next year, along with training more facilitators to run the workshops. We’d certainly consider making them compulsory in the future, as the feedback was so positive and it seems to have worked very well at other colleges.”

Delaney nevertheless did acknowledge that it was difficult to judge the impact of the sessions. She said, “What I do know is that ‘grey areas’ were dispelled. I would hope people are at least more aware of what happens and aware of their actions.

“Around 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 80,000 women raped each year in the UK. When people understand that rape and assault are not just anomalies, we can treat it as a serious, widespread problem.”

Sarah Pine, the OUSU Vice President (Women), provided training for the sessions. She said that she supports Wadham’s initiative in making the workshops compulsory telling Cherwell, “I would encourage lots of colleges to make these sessions compulsory in the future. Sexual violence is such a widespread problem that is under-acknowledged in the university as a whole.”

The Sexual Health and Consent workshop is not the only compulsory talk held in Wadham’s Freshers Week; students were also expected to attend an informal hour and a half discussion about ‘Welfare @ Wadham’, and a talk held by Wadham students about ‘life and work in Oxford as scholars and students’, amongst others.

Police officers were called to a fight which broke out at a St Peter’s College bop on Saturday 12 October. Thames Valley Police confirmed that two men were arrested, one of whom was cautioned for possession of cannabis.

The two London men, aged 31 and 21, were believed to be friends of a bop attendee. They are due to appear at Oxford Magistrates’ Court later this month, charged with obstructing or resisting a police officer in the execution of their duties. Both have been released on bail.

Neither of the men in question are thought to be members of Oxford University.

Cherwell understands that St Peter’s porters managed to eject the two men from the bop itself, but had to call police in order to remove them from college premises.

One unnamed St Peter’s student told Cherwell that she saw thirteen policemen enter the bar on Saturday evening. She said, “There were a couple of guys having a fight – not Peterites, just randoms. But they brought all the police for crowd control if they needed it.”

She added, “It was pretty crazy for the first bop”.

George Galloway’s speech on Monday night at the Oxford Union was interrupted by a student bearing an Israeli flag.

Following an impassioned, hour-long speech during which Galloway revered Churchill’s patriotism and criticised the legacy of Tony Blair and New Labour, which he said has left a “crumbling” state with “rotten” institutions, the floor was opened to questions from the public. 

The protesting student, who stood up following a number of questions by other members of the audience, approached the MP for Bradford West whilst he intoned a speech in Hebrew and gesticulated angrily at Mr Galloway.

The student bore an Israeli flag beneath a blue jumper, which appeared at first to be a suspicious object. Mr Galloway warned the student that he felt “threatened” and asked him to back off.

He then began speaking in English and criticised Mr Galloway for his behaviour during his last visit to Oxford, when he refused to engage in a debate with Brasenose PPE student Eylon Aslan-Levy, on the grounds that he did not wish to “debate with Israelis”. It had been previously reported that Galloway had intended to “annihilate” his opponent in the debate. A video of the debate went viral and was reported in national headlines. 

When Galloway told him that “you’re yourself a lot of harm”, the student, who is reported to be fellow Brasenose student Jonathan Hunter, told Mr Galloway that  “I think you did a lot of harm by not speaking to my friend Eylon and not having a constructive dialogue with him” before informing him he did not in fact have a question for him, “because I don’t debate with racists”, after which he walked out of the debating chamber. 

Galloway later commented that the last time he had seen an Israeli flag was at an EDL rally last week, saying that he found it “not surprising” that “fascists” should want to fly the Israeli flag. 

At the beginning of his speech on Monday night, Mr Galloway referred to a student who had confronted him on his previous visit to the Union regarding Freedom of speech in Venezuela as a “hapless young fellow”. A video of the question, followed by Galloway’s response, went viral online and was aired on Venezuelan TV. 

Later on during question time, Mr Galloway was again confronted about his refusal to debate Eylon Aslan-Levy last term when a student asked him if he considered himself to be “a racist”. To this he retorted that it was the “racist ideology” of Zionism which should be labelled as such, comparing it to Apartheid South Africa. 

In a tweet after the event, George Galloway published a picture of the protesting student with the caption “…and we’ve found the fool of the night!”.

George Galloway has been the fruit of much controversy in recent years. Having been expelled from the Labour Party in 2004 for his views on the Iraq war, he established his own party, Respect, winning a seat for Bradford West in the 2012 by-election. In his last visit to the Oxford Union last year, he was confronted by feminist protestors due to his comments that the charges brought against Julian Assange in Sweden do not amount to rape.